Blog, blog, blog.

Archive Page 2

We introduced some new filter options today that give you greater control of your feeds.

Now you can block word/phrase instances occurring in the title, body, category, tag, or author of the post (not just in the entire post.) This feature will let you create more specific rules to clean your feeds.

You can also specify where your operators occur by using “starts with,” “ends with” options.

These new options have some friends that are coming very, very soon. Keep an eye out for some significant enhancements in the next couple of days.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, we’ve launched our tag cloud. What makes ours different is the tags being displayed are the ones being blocked by our users (actually, we show those being searched for as well as those being blocked). So, without further ado, we give you the Crud Cloud:

For those of you who are aware of regular expressions, you’ll be pleased to hear – and we’re mighty pleased to announce – regular expression support for your Feed Rinse filters. Here’s how it works, just add a leading and trailing slash to your filter term like this:

/gaming|gamers?/

That will allow you to block anything that matches either ‘gaming’ or ‘gamer(s)’, and of course you can use regexps with “does not contain” to filter in the good stuff.

We’ve had a few inquiries regarding boolean (”AND”/”OR”) searches. We do allow this, we simply approach it in a fashion that’s easier to view and modify.

You’ll notice a checkbox that reads “filter only if all criteria are met” at the bottom of each of your filters. Checking this creates a logical “AND” between each “contain” rule and a logical “OR” between each “does not contain” rule.

So, if you’d like to block all posts that do not contain Web 2.0 OR Paris Hilton AND block posts that contain crufty, you’d set up the following rules:

block posts that do not contain the keyword Web 2.0

block posts that do not contain the keyword Paris Hilton

block posts that contain the keyword crufty

(and then check “filter only if all criteria are met”)

This will make sure that you get your posts about Web 2.0 or Paris but not if they contain crufty.

Hope that makes sense. We’re implementing a built-in regular expression option for all you information scientists out there as well. Should be ready shortly.

Today we made a slight update to Feed Rinse to help you find your new feeds in your overall list. Basically, if you add a new feed to your account, the feed will be marked as [new] the next time you log in to your account. This is especially nifty for heavy bookmarklet users or for those of you with big feed lists.

Pretty simple change, but it should make it quite a bit easier to find your newest feeds. More updates coming soon.

Interest in Feed Rinse has already exceeded our initial estimates, and that’s part of the reason we’re going to be scheduling some downtime this evening for a motherboard upgrade on the server. Sometime between midnight and 4:00am tonight the server will be offline for a short period of time as we swap out the hardware.

This upgrade will result in a brighter, faster, and more enjoyable rinsing experience for all our users.

If you visit our features and pricing section, you’ll notice that we’ve listed some features for the plus and premium plans that haven’t been released yet. A few of the features are simple, necessary improvements to Feed Rinse that will be rolled out for all accounts. We’re also developing some exciting new features that will have a bit more of a profound enhancement to the service.

One of those features is Smart aRSS, which allows users to put things in to their feeds rather than taking things out (don’t worry, we’re not talking about ads). More details on Smart aRSS are coming soon.

Also, if the current pricing model seems a little ambitious, it will make more sense soon. A new pricing tier will also be available to fit between the free and plus accounts.

Feed Rinse launched on March 22nd and thanks to the blog community, it’s been a great ride so far. As Aaron mentioned earlier, we’ve already had a lot of signups with more being added all the time. We thought it made sense to call out a few of the bloggers who took the time to cover Feed Rinse and help get the word out:

…and all the others from around the world (apparently, we’re particularly popular in Japan). The conductor has queued up the orchestra, so I’m supposed to wrap it up.

One final note, the social web as a whole is really an amazing organism. Spending a day on del.icio.us/popular was a good time. While we’re big fans of ma.gnolia and blinklist, there is little doubt about who the most influencial social bookmarking site is.

Anyway, we’re going to get back to ramping up the new features and getting the plus and premium accounts live. Thanks, friends.

We’ve been getting great user feedback on the product. Popular opinion seems to be that it’s very easy to use, and that makes us happy.

We did notice a post somewhere along the way from an author concerned that Feed Rinse may be a threat to his revenue opportunities (by allowing users to filter out advertisements). We thought we should address the concern head on.

Feed Rinse was built to clear clutter. Our aim is to give readers more power to tune out noise and tune in to content they feel is relevant. It is not to create the RSS equivalent of a pop-up blocker.

Feed Rinse does not strip ads from posts. Any features considered by our team aim at increasing access to the content users want. They do not aim to de-monitize that content.

Bloggers are our friends…so much so, that we developed Feed Rinse to help us/you stay in touch with more of them.